Micro-blogging the eZ Conference

For those who haven't heard of "Micro-blogging" wikipedia defines it as:

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

Twitter is currently the most popular micro-blogging service but can have reliability issues (these have been addressed recently). I've been using it for a couple of months now. It can be a bit of a time suck especially if you follow frequent tweaters. I've found it a good way to keep track of what friends, the web industry & eZ people are up to, pose questions and actually get answers.

One of the things that has always frustrated my about not attending the eZ conference in the past is that it takes about a week for news and coverage to filter out. I suspect people are too busy doing "conference stuff" to write blog posts during the event.

This year I'm finally attending the eZ Conference (eZ Community Developer Day & PHP Vikinger) and am planing to utilise twitter to micro-blog the event in an attempt to provide some "real time" coverage. I've had conservations with Tony Wood of Vision WT fame who is also interested. The frequency of content will depend on what kind of internet aceess is availiable, and I'll utilise SMS tweats as a backup if required.

Of course anyone can do this and the more the merrier! If you are going to use twitter, add "#ezconf" within the tweet. This is called a hashtag and allows for tweets about a particular topic to be grouped by services like Summize.

In the preface to the current Admin interface specification the last paragraph caught my eye:A overview of user task need a dashboard, where she can follow here own content, approval and other tasks she might do on a regular basis.I recently saw a demo of the latest version of the bug tracking system JIRA 4.0 by Atlassian. It used an OpenSocial dashboard to allow users to customise their homepage to access and interact with information that was important to them. The system not only displays JIRA widgets but any OpenSocial widgets (and those from other Atlassian products). You can check out a video of it in action here and more information on how Atlassian is using OpenSocial here.

What is OpenSocial? From the official site:OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML,
developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds. Google personal home page is an example of an OpenSocial da…

The Admin Interface Refresh project has had a concept implemented that can be reviewed live with an eZ Publish install. This is a guide on how to get things working.

The new Admin Interface design is a prototype and it's constantly being refined so don't try this on your production servers.

Starting from a clean install of eZ Publish 4.2 with the the eZ Flow package (with content)Change into the design directory # cd designCheckout the design# svn co http://pubsvn.ez.no/nextgen/trunk/design/admin2Edit settings/siteaccess/admin_site/site.ini.append.php and change the SiteDesign to admin2[DesignSettings]SiteDesign=admin2Grab new menu.ini - this is required to display the left hand menus under Setup and My account.# cd settings/siteaccess/admin_site/# wget http://pubsvn.ez.no/nextgen/trunk/settings/menu.iniClear the cacheYou should now be able to view the new interface and it should look something like this:

To revert back to the original interface:Remove the menu.ini from the ad…